Grants

This project investigates the massive mobilization of volunteering and informal help in civil society aiming to alleviate the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for vulnerable groups in Danish society. The aim is to produce insight into the supply and demand of help and analyze what mechanisms influence the exchange, e.g. social capital distribution or digitization of volunteering projects from the perspective of both helpers/volunteers and recipients of help. We combine four data sources: 1) a short interval three wave panel survey with a population representative sample of 8,000 adults carried out by Statistics Denmark. 2) a short interval three wave panel survey of all of the more than 250 corona help groups that has been organized on Facebook during the crisis so far. 3) Extensive ethnographies of Facebook group cultures and interviews of groups and volunteers/helpers and users/helped. 4) Big social media data from the Facebook groups analyzed by digital methods.

The research project offers an ethnographic examination of how socially marginalized citizens are affected by and respond to covid-19 related lockdown measures. The lockdown has affected the availability of formal services such as drop-in centres, shelters and outreach services. However, the project works with the assumption that these formal services only constitutes one means of making ends meet for the most vulnerable. Equally important are social networks characterised by 'accelerated intimacy' that people rely on to get by at the margins of the welfare system: securing a bed for the night, a meal, friendship, or a sense of belonging. In continuation of this, the project explores the effects of current measures restricting social contact and encourage social distancing, for marginalized citizens for whom social relationships and proximity are crucial to everyday strategies for getting by.

As effective vaccines are not yet developed for COVID-19, the evidence suggest that non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as social distancing and other behavioral changes among citizens, are the best way to curb the spread of the virus. Tackling the COVID-19 pandemic thereby becomes a key task for not just medicine but also the social sciences: How do we persuade citizens to potentially long-term behavioral changes in their everyday lives? This project funds the Danish data collection as part of a multi-country study, spearhead by Yale University, into the relative effectiveness of moral messaging on the public’s behavioral intentions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project merges the societal need for effective messaging in the coming months with foundational work in philosophy and social psychology on the relative effectiveness of distinct moral imperatives on behavioral change. The results can produce important guidelines for effective communication strategies to curb COVID-19.

The current COVID-19 lockdown measures aimed at limiting total contacts have tremendously high costs for the economy and the population’s mental health. How to live with the virus without a vaccine remains an urgent open question. The objective of this project is to provide novel decision support tools to enable policymakers to evaluate, compare, and suggest new contact limitation measures with the objective of maximizing the number of contacts, while staying within a target allowable disease spread. Specifically, this project investigates the hypothesis that the same basic reproduction number R0 is obtainable with more contact moments when one limits the number of distinct contacts. To this end, the project combines operations research tools with novel epidemiology models that model distinct contacts resulting from interactions in a social network and daily activity patterns. The aim is to identify promising policy avenues fast, with the first results expected by the end of summer.

Beyond being a major health crisis, the corona crisis is the largest negative shock we have seen to business the last 100 years. We map the consequence through a 2 part survey send out to all active firms in Denmark w 3+ employees. We map impact on employment, estimates of business survival depending on the length of the crisis, business liquidity, financial challenges, and the use and effect of government programs aimed at supporting business during the crisis. Our 1st contribution is to map these consequences and provide a platform to which we can understand how severe the situation is and what business can do to minimize the cost. Our 2nd contribution is to combine the survey with register data to investigate what characterize resilient firms: How firm organization, firm type, management practice and leadership style interact with business performance during crisis. Our 3rd contribution is to evaluate the use and effectiveness of government programs to help business during crisis.

Experts have long warned of a global pandemic. Yet, states have ignored these warnings and failed to prepare adequately. Now, outdated public health laws are being hastily revised and - underwritten by criminal sanctions - given intense societal significance, without adequate democratic scrutiny. This project will contribute to Danish and European responses to COVID-19 by thoroughly mapping and evaluating these hurriedly drafted provisions, while making rapid recommendations for legislative amendments. The project will zero in on restrictions of liberty (internal and external movement) and surveillance measures (tracking using telecommunications data and mobile applications) adopted in Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The case studies, drawing on human rights, EU privacy and international health law, will be evaluated based on the principles of proportionality, non-discrimination and transparency. PRONTO will provide a research based, open access legal data source.

To control the current COVID-19 pandemic it is of utmost importance to have robust tests that can detect the virus at very early stages of infection and, at the same time, predict the severity of clinical symptoms the patient may suffer. With this application, we will address this unmet need by providing a testing platform that quickly and specifically diagnoses SARS-CoV-2 infection from small blood samples and predicts the likelihood of severe illness. The test is based on the 'APTASHAPE' technology where changes in human biomarkers are identified by billions of small molecular biosensors that can be read out by next generation sequencing and subsequently be translated into known proteins and metabolites by high throughput mass spectrometry. By training our technology on known human COVID-19 cases from the current pandemic and an experimental corona model in pigs, we will be able to create a screening platform applicable to individuals with unknown disease status.